One spring day our family drove out to the lake to move some building materials we had left there. Much to the delight of our children, we found under some of the boards a nest in which were three very young skunks. The children said, “Oh, they are so cute! Can we keep them and raise them for pets?”
We found a box to put them in so we could take them back to town. We planned to take them to a vet and hoped he could remove the awful skunk odor.
Though these beautiful little creatures were very young, we quickly discovered that their skunk odor had already developed. This should make each one of us think about the answer to this question: “How soon does our sin nature begin to show itself?” My wife and I were teachers and often saw children who were very much like our little skunks. They were beautiful little children, but their bad behavior showed that their sin nature had already begun to work.
Psalm 51 tells us what King David said: “I acknowledge my [sins]. . . . In sin did my mother conceive me.” He understood that he was born with a sin nature, and you and I were born with one too. Like the young skunks’ odor, our sin nature always shows itself when we are young. When we begin to show our sin nature, we become sinners by practice.
We also learn from Romans 8:3 that God has “condemned sin in the flesh” - the sin nature. It is evil and unacceptable to God. But we can be very thankful that God still loves us and has provided a remedy for both our sin nature and our practice of sin. The Bible says, “Through this man [the Lord Jesus] is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins.” Acts 13:38. Because the Lord Jesus, the only person who never had a sin nature, paid to God full payment for sins, He can forgive our sins. 1 John 1:9 tells us just what to do: “If we confess our sins, He [the Lord Jesus] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” That settles the matter forever; our sins are gone and God will never give us up. But it was a different story with our little skunks.
We had not gone far toward home before our little pets’ odor became so bad we had to take them back and return them to the nest. We realized, as pretty as they were and as little as they were, they were still skunks by nature. The skunks could do nothing about their nature, but each one of us can come to the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour and receive a new, divine nature and have all our sins forgiven. The little skunks could only grow up to be big skunks. When we open our hearts to the Lord Jesus and receive Him as our own Saviour, though we are little sinners, we do not have to grow up to be big sinners and continue in our old habits and ways of sin. We become one of God’s children. We can enjoy the Father’s house and the joys of heaven.
Won’t you trust the Lord Jesus today to begin your happy life as one of God’s children?
ML-10/09/1994